I've always been obsessed with this painting. I know, I'm a little sick.
Olympia's Lover
Beauty refuses to be home-bred.
Beauty would rather flower fingers
over chastity than accept bouquets
from wheezing suitors. Beauty, what blooms
in the hydrangea between your thighs?
Beauty, your chalk skin sweats me.
Take my heat like carnations, Beauty.
Let roses curve their petals to match
the floral mounds of your pillowed
divinity. Beauty are you a deity?
I could choke you better
than any little black string.
I could skin you better than the milky
highlights Manet paints you with.
I should wear you--
an engraving in the flat plate
of the little gold bracelet
you got from me last Tuesday.
I know how long those legs stretch.
Dirtied sheets, not by wooden slippers
but by the sweated anxieties of a business
woman. When is your promotion?
When do your night hours come
to a close? Let me change you
to a housewife or let me embalm
your night dreams to last forever.
My longing reflects in the vulgar
way you eye me, stab me.
Defy me. Dog no fidelity.
I want to hear you purr
the final phrases of a siren dismembered
from her redlight home in Greece.
Turn away the gifts, Beauty, then tell
your niggerish woman to close
those jaded curtains from the saints.
And when my breath trembles on the linen
tell your cat to hiss the climactic ships
into the rocky bellows of the sea.
But before you're gone you tell them both
though the slippers cast there is no way
to keep your whorish, seeping vows
anywhere away from me.
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